Distastful Advertising Continues: "Gatoring"

iforgotmyfirstlogon sent us a link to an article on CNet about Gatoring, a fabulous new advertising technique where advertising buy key words and pop up windows over competitors. The kicker is that this is a byproduct of a commonly installed activex plugin. And its only gonna get worse.

Comments

Some more disturbing facts

[friday2k]

As many of you might be aware, Gator also offers a so called form filler that fills your personal information into merchant forms (shipping address, credit card number and such). So once I decided to install this "thing" to try it out. Works fine. Then I wanted to look a little bit into security. They do not publish how they encrypt your sensitive data, they only claim that yourt information is encrypted and absolutely secure. Well, well, I emailed them. After 3 emails to their customer service I finally got the response that they do not publish how they do security and encryption (may I assume it is ROT-13 then!?) for SECURITY REASONS! Now I can only say, be afraid, be very afraid of the next worm ...

Gator is easily removable? HA

[Mnemia]

The funniest part in the story was when the Gator.com executive was quoted as saying the Gator is "easily removable via the Add/Remove Programs dialogue". When I downloaded several programs containing Gator, it didn't install immediately. Instead, it would just sit invisble in the background and wait like an hour. If you tried to delete its installer in this time period it would be locked by the OS. THe only way to delete it before it installed on those programs (which I am POSITIVE did not give the option to install without Gator) was to kill the program and then delete the file. Anyone else see this delay tactic? I think it is meant to make Gator just "show up" on the computer later to prevent the user from just immediately deleting it without "trying" it.

Ive seen it..

[xfs]

I've seen gator come with AudioGalaxy, and iMesh too I think..

Sneaky bastards

[4n0nym0u53 C0w4rd]

I recently installed Snood and it came with Gator and OfferCompanion. Here's what sucked:

• During the install process I was told that Snood came with the "coolest" new software, and that Gator would be automatically installed. No option to install without it (unlike Bearshare).
• After installation, Gator didn't immediately start up, appear in the start menu, or appear in the "add/remove programs" menu. It waited about 5-10 minutes before popping up. This prevented me from immediately uninstalling this parasitic software.
• After killing Gator, my firewall caught the "Onflow Player Installer" trying to access it's web site.
• When I was finally able to uninstall Gator, it's uninstall program warned me that "Deleting your user information will erase all your passwords account numbers and login IDs." I can imagine a novice aborting the uninstall after a warning like that. It doesn't mention that it is only referring to the data that you gave Gator.
• If this software was really useful, you'd think people would want to install it. Remember ThirdVoice, it was a tool that let users annotate web pages with their own content that was visible to other ThirdVoice users. It never acheived the market penetration it needed. There's a program that people could actually find useful, and it didn't make it. I can only imagine the sheer contempt for the user that these companies must have. To resort to such deceptive and misleading practices just to show some unwanted advertisements...

I've said it before and I'll say it again: finding new surface area for advertisements is not a creative endeavor. These people are the biggest hacks in the world, and deserve to watch Rosie O'Donnell eat BBQ ribs without a napkin.

The internet will be destroyed

[ioman1]

Marketers and advertising will ruin the internet just like it ruined TV. Television ratings are at an all time low and less people are watching TV. There are more commercials on now than there are actual programs.

One of the most annoying things about gator

[sheetsda]

...is that when you uninstall it, it installs another program under a different name and icon that does the same thing gator does. It takes two uninstalls and reboots to remove it from your system, and how long will it take the average user to notice that unidentified icon among the 20 or so others. If you ask me, this self-replication and concealment is nothing more than a virus disguised as a "legitimate" program in a grey area of the law.

If you're using windows.........

[sometwo]

Get adaware. It'll get rid of that stuff. (the spyware and gatorware not windows)

Re:It's illegal

[wishus]

Read the article instead of rushing to get a post at the top. Gator doesn't change anyones web content. It pops up an ad - in another window - on the user's desktop.

This was all clearly outlined in the article you obviously didn't read.

Fighting This

[BlenderHead-2001]

The article does mention Ad Aware to get rid of this if you accidently let it get installed in the first place. In addition I use the Proxomitron to just get rid of those annoying pop-ups/unders/whatever completely. It's fully configurable and let's you create your own filters in a manner similar to Perl's regular expressions.

Re:You're wrong.

[Bonker]

Sadly, the man bought his computer expressly for the purpose of playing games. I would be remiss in my duties to reccomend Linux as a gaming platform. That may change in the near future, but right now there is a very limited selection of games for Linux, and a zero "Off the shelf" selection.

how i removed it

[rebelcool]

(mind you, im using win2k)

First tried the add/remove programs method, of course it couldnt get rid of the file that gator starts from, because the file was *running*.

Had to go into win2k's process list. Find the process (i believe there was more than 1) and shut them down. THEN I had to go and use add/remove programs.

Finally, i had to go into explorer and delete the remnants of it that wasnt uninstalled.

I cant imagine what id do without the process list.

Re:What's worse

[ryanwright]

I personally think it's a valid strategy

It's bullshit. Do you know how many projection TVs I've seen with some station's watermark burned into the screen? I have a nice high-def projection set, and I refuse to watch any station that does this. Static images on any projector for a significant amount of time will cause burn in. Not cool.

BTW, I've never had a problem figuring out which station I'm on.

Re:So, so wrong

[Idaho]

You're right, pop-up ads will get worse.
...
These types of ads are going to be much more successful, because we will learn to live with them.

I already learned how to live with them. Add this line to your Mozilla's prefs.js:

user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open", "noAccess");

And you're fixed.

This is one of the major reasons I'm using Mozilla for everyday browsing now. Every irritating banner I see gets a 'right click->block images from this server', and voila, another Banner Advertizer that will never bother me again.

Same goes for cookies: it's really irritating when every site has to ask if it may store a cookie. Therefore, I use the default setting 'accept all cookies'. Every now and then, I delete all crappy *ad*=Your-Unique-Tracking-Id-Here-cookies using the Preferences->Security menu, while enabling 'don't allow deleted cookies to be accepted again'. Another problem solved.

I guess similar programs/plugins exist for IE (but, as you might have noticed, IE doesn't run on Linux :-)